With the expansion of the Internet and increase of access to the Internet, a wide variety of web based interfaces and systems have developed. These interfaces and systems often enhance the value and utility provided by an Internet web site or electronic information system or service. The success of an Internet web site, for example, may strongly depend on the quality of the utilities provided by the web site. In addition, the growth in the field of Internet web sites has demanded that competitive companies provide more than a single resource on their website.
As a consequence, many companies have continued to develop custom applications or services for their Internet web site. The requirements for maintaining a complex and specialized development process to support these services increase in relation to the availability of the features and services, as well as in relation to the complexity of the services. A small company may lack the resources to devote to such development work, while a large enterprise with multiple diverse computing systems, perhaps as a result of corporate mergers or acquisitions, may find the resources required prohibitive with regards to the number of websites or web services.
One avenue of development to deal with the demand for distributed applications that place the highest priority on interoperability has been with web services. In many ways, web services have evolved from past distributed component technologies like remote procedure calls (RPC), object-oriented remote procedure calls ORPC (DCOM, CORBA, Java RMI), and messaging services. The web services platform as evolved by the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) (see <http://www.ws-i.org>) defines a simple, interoperable, messaging framework upon which one can build more sophisticated designs, but which remains simpler and more uniform than pervious distributed component technologies. A web service includes, but is not limited to, a discrete function or set of functions which operate across the Internet and which perform in a uniform manner across the Internet, regardless of whether or not the service is compatible or complies with formal Web Services standard setting organizations.
As this disclosure focuses on the exchange of web services, a few brief examples of some of the possible services may serve to help illustrate the type of services being exchanged. For example, one web service may represent the ability to draw a map connecting a known location to one selected by a user of the web site which subscribes to or maintains the functionality of the web service. Such a service would have value to any business which desired to have its website operable to show any and all potential clients how to locate their offices. As a different example, another web service may provide current and constantly updated information and images related to a particular topic, including but not limited to such topics as traffic reports, business news, and weather.